Man, not again. #Apple sells seriously under-specced devices to maintain their “starting from…” price and then upselling people to actually-usable models. Remember those 16 GB flash iPhones they kept selling (2010–2016! I checked!), even though that meant people didn’t even have enough space to update their OS? 8 GB RAM is that, once more, but for runtime memory.
I think the 256 GB flash, 8 GB RAM minimum-spec Mac is a low-resource trap for anyone who wants to use a computer for more than light web browsing (and I mean light—web pages are resource hogs these days) or a messaging client. They are certainly not suitable for anyone wanting to locally store or edit media.
For 2024, I think 512 GB flash and 16 GB RAM should be minimum for MacBook Air, while 1 TB and 32 GB RAM should be minimum for MacBook Pro.
“Apple argues in favor of selling Macs with only 8GB of RAM”
@drahardja perhaps I should have clarified. 3200 bucks.and you only get 16 gigs of soldered in Ram with an operating system that is more obese than me 😉
this is a performance grade workstation laptop...
As much as I can't stand Apple offering less than 16 gigs since the last MacBook Pro I owned in 2014 had 16 gigs and profession I think 32 gigs is the new midline standard.
the fact of the matter is it's the least of our concerns in the computer ecosystem....
Mac OS is MUCH less bloated..
And for many consumers this is good enough...
Cost is not ideal and DO acknowledge that as being the bigger problem than the amount of RAM they offer....
Thats the real key issue with apple.
The ram tax. Its real and is the root issue.
BTW
Even more shockingly I was on lenovo's website for another client late last year and we are looking at laptops and they were offering new ones that run Windows 11 out of the box with only 4 gigs of perma ram..
@Warlockofwires The world of Windows laptops is so open and varied that it’s almost up to the individual to select the configuration and price they’re willing to pay. The conceit of Apple’s products, however, is that they offer a small selection of well-curated variants, so the customer doesn’t need to do their own research and configuration. With that kind of sales model, there should be no configuration that functions essentially as an upsell trap, which the low-end configurations are.
I run a Fairphone 4 with 6GiB RAM and 128GB internal storage, and added a 400GB microSD card and migrated to Android 13, which runs fine on it. (I've also been progressively removing my connections to Google, which Fairphone makes easier.)
@drahardja was in a budget pinch last fall and bought a 15” M2 MBA with 8GB RAM, 512GB flash... it's "fine" but i'm already budgeting for something beefier, at least for music production work.
I love the battery life but i get memory errors and occasional lag when too many things are open. That never used to happen with me and Macs but now it happens pretty regularly and i hate it
@aaronesilvers I think RAM compression has made the “out of RAM” experience a lot more bearable than it was in the old days, especially with hard drives. Instead of running into a wall and halting to swap out RAM pages to a spinning disk, macOS (and iOS) now compresses the oldest pages and keeps them in RAM as long as possible. This slows you down, but not as much as if the pages were actually swapped out. It also reduces flash wear, which is great.
Having said that, it is slower, and you’ll notice it if it happens a lot.
@drahardja Apple’s memory prices (RAM and disk) have been my biggest gripe with the hardware since I got my first Mac. They are terrible and it irks me. I think it will end up biting them in the end.
@drahardja yeah, they've argued previously that 8GB on a Mac is equivalent to 16GB on PCs, and I don't remember what their justification for that is, but I'm not buying it (literally and figuratively)
@adr Apple famously says these kinds of things (200 MHz on PowerPC is equivalent to 400 MHz on a Pentium, 2 GB RAM on iPhone is equivalent to 4 GB RAM on Android…) and while it’s kinda true because Apple’s tech makes efficient use of resources, it’s also kinda not true because a lot of applications just need raw resources to work well.
Add comment